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cge32 karma

I know this question is a bit late, but: what actual research has been done on truBrain? And what has been published? I often feel that a concern with companies selling supplements of this sort is the lack of rigorous published research; it seems to me that there is a place for such research even when it is not a regulatory requirement, and it would certainly go very far in convincing the public, as well as the research community, of your product’s efficacy.

The pilot QEEG study you list on your “results” page is concerning, particularly in how it is presented. As the page admits, it had no blinding, no behavioral assessment, and involved 7 people over one week. This might seem alright for an initial pilot study of a product that wasn’t already on the market, but the results don’t seem to actually be presented. Instead, most of what is discussed are what participants mentioned, along with some vague images that have colorbar legends with no units. The page admits that your averaged alpha change (in what? amplitude?) didn’t clear a reasonable threshold (e.g., p=0.5 or 0.1) of significance. Throughout, there’s no discussion of the actual quantitative results, and honestly, 90% of it sounds like picking bits out of the results that can be made to sound good. And, of course, there’s no reasonable methods section.

Then, you move to a huge font saying “truBrain shown to increase: Visualization, Attention, Focus, Calm” (punctuation added). That doesn’t seem to be at all a reasonable conclusion from the vague results you’ve presented, and certainly seems as though it may be premature and irresponsible.

Is this research presented anywhere in an appropriate scholarly format, with quantitative results and a methods section? Was it, as the logo you have with “UCLA” in it seems to imply, done at UCLA? If so, with what groups are you collaborating? I can’t seem to find any information on any of this. Even just putting something up on figshare or perhaps arXiv’s q-bio would be nice.

I’m a bit concerned too, honestly, at the closeness of the sample size (7) and the number of people on your “Our Team” page (11). Is there a connection?

The links to studies that you list appear to be links to a variety of previously published papers by unrelated groups looking at individual ingredients in a variety of contexts, many of which are unrelated to your usage.

Apart from these concerns about research publication, I do have a few questions about the presentation of your own team, and your own experience.

Firstly, I’m assuming that UCLA has some oddities with the way its programs are arranged, as your thesis lists your degree as being in Psychology, not Cognitive Neuroscience (Dr. Attar, on the other hand, does have hers list her degree as Neuroscience). You received this in 2012, and you don’t appear to have any refereed journal publications (chapters in books published by Springer are not quite the same). While your bio lists you as lecturing for UCLA through UEI, you don’t appear in the campus directory, and UEI isn’t exactly the same as even lecturing for a department. Yet you appear to be what amounts to the PI for truBrain’s research. All of this isn’t necessarily a problem, and there are certainly researchers who have excelled in this way, but what experience do you have in managing research beyond being a graduate student?

As one last note that particularly irks me: in several places on your website, you are described as “Dr. Andrew Hill, PhD.” There are also referenced to “Dr. Aida Attar, PhD.” I’ve rarely seen this double-mention format outside of dubious companies, and it would probably be a good idea to correct it.

I’m sorry if this seems particularly hostile, but as I am sure you realize, the dietary supplement field is rife with dubious science, and as a result I feel legitimate companies should be expected to be able to strongly defend their results against reasonable skepticism.

cge9 karma

This is exactly the sort of response I was hoping for; thank you. As you note, many companies doing similar things don't seem to be doing sound investigation into their products, and that means that companies that are need to work hard to make that clear.

To address some of these limits, we recently completed a study with a slightly better design - ~ 20 people, double-blinded, placebo controlled, two days of testing for each person, QEEG measures, and on-task EEG measures.

That's great to hear. I'll look forward to seeing the results. Have you considered, however, any non-EEG measures?

I certainly won't cite it as published data, but I may talk about what I found informally. I don't think that rises to any suspicious agenda or ethical dilemma.

It doesn't, and I was pleased to see that you reported your poor results along with your better results from the pilot study, in addition to pointing out its significant limitations. I think, unfortunately, it can be hard to strike a balance between marketing that won't be criticized by researchers but will still attract customers, but it does seem like you're going in the right direction with further, more rigorous studies.